The End of the Dance

I didn't realize how sad this was moment was until I wrote the title for this post. The End of the Dance. This isn't just the end of a book. Powell's million word, 12-novel, 4-volume work could never be called "a book." To some extent, it feels like the end of a chapter in my own life. I've been reading it for more than a year and a half now, and so much has happened in that time. And all along, every night, there was Nick Jenkins. It's not a book - it feels more like a relationship. And my "relationship" with A Dance to the Music of Time has lasted lasted longer than some actual relationships.

I began this book in November or December of 2007. It's been so long ago now, I don't remember. I complained, incessantly, about this novel in the beginning. I was beginning to fear he would be like Henry James, as Powell is prone to comma use and long-windedness. But I've been very wrong about books before, and I learned (with Things Fall Apart specifically), that you can absolutely detest 75-90% of a novel and then something happens at the end that makes that whole experience worth while. That's why I never give up on reading something, even if I can't stand it. Even if I find myself throwing it against the wall. The only exception was Suite Francais. But that was just bad writing.

Anyway. It really wasn't until I saw the first part of the BBC version that I really "got" it. Somehow seeing it all come together in a 2-hour visual presentation allowed me to put the pieces together. Oh - that's what was going on. It suddenly made sense.

Perhaps if the second volume (comprised of the fourth, fifth and sixth novels in the series) wasn't as fabulous as it was, this review would have taken a different tone...I might have had an entirely different opinion about Dance. These novels really were fabulous: Fitzgerald's parties set in London instead of America. It was kind of like that. There wasn't dancing in the fountain, but people were falling down stairs and dying, drunk butlers getting bit by monkeys, and their fair share of drinks...though probably much more sipped politely than glugged.

I didn't particularly like the third volume, which dealt with World War II. It was really here, however, that the genius of Powell's work comes to light. It would seem that an author would put his character at the center of all action, that he would be present for everything important that happens in the course of the novel. But that isn't Dance. It's the exact opposite. Nick is never involved in anything really exciting during the war. There's the Blitz, but Nick is never in a building that blows up - though a number of his friends unfortunately are. Death mostly occurs "off screen", and is casually mentioned or learned through here say. And that's what makes Dance to the Music of Time really unique - the narrator is not the central character. We barely know anything about Nick. Powell tells us just enough to move the narrative forward. That was the most frustrating thing about these novels at first...I wanted to know more about Nick. But once I was able to accept that this was what Powell was giving us...it wasn't Nick's story, it was the story of everyone around him - once I let go of my need to know Nick, the novels were much more enjoyable.

The fourth volume was really mixed - some of it I enjoyed (poor X. Trapnel), some of it I wasn't thrilled with (Scorpio). But overall, it was good. And I don't know that I'll ever get the image of Widmerpool jogging into the mist - "I'm leading, I'm leading..."

Though occassionally likened - rightly, I believe - to Jane Austen, Powell is most often compared to Proust. I've never read Proust...I'm afraid of In Search of Lost Time, but then again I was afraid of Powell (whose name is pronounced like "pole" and rhymes with "Lowell", which may or may not be the same thing, probably depending on whether or not British or not). But having never read Proust, I imagine that the comparison is simply in the shere ambition and volume of their two masterpieces, not necessarily in style. In an interview for the Paris Review in the 1970s, Powell briefly addressed the comparisons with Proust: "the essential difference is that Proust is an enormously subjective writer who has a peculiar genius for describing how he or his narrator feels. Well, I really tell people a minimum of what my narrator feels – just enough to keep the narrative going." Nick is much more the eye of the hurricane than the center of action - all the important stuff that moves the story along is happening to other people, happening around Nick, not to him. The things that do happen to Nick aren't important in terms of the plot. As I said earlier, what happens to Nick only happens to move the story forward...so that he can meet someone else, or run into someone he hasn't seen in a while, or be told an interesting story about someone.

But I don't want you to think the series, or any individual component of it, has a plot. Because it doesn't. Stuff happens, but like life, there isn't a sequence of events leading to a climax. So this whole level that fiction has typicall engaged on is just left out. What it is replaced by is perhaps unsurpassed in literature, or maybe surpassed only by Proust. You get to know an awful lot of people. You spend 100 pages or so with someone, then they go away, only to be reintroduced in another context - as someone's new wife or business partner. And this is where the book becomes rich, where it is funny and tragic. And that's also why you can't give up after the first section, or why you can't "dabble" or read some here, some there. As a review for the Times wrote,

He is a writer who should be read in bulk, however. Dipped into at random, any one of these books can seem bland at best. But several together reveal rich patterns in the caperings and transformations, the pairings and partings, the exits and reappearances of Powell's more than 300 characters.

Just as in real life, knowing the context of relationships is important. Knowing that Widmerpool essentially sent Stringham to his death isn't quite as tragic if you don't know the back stroy from when they were at school together. And knowing Bithel's interactions with Widmerpool during hte war make their interactions in the cult much more meaningful. Barbara Wallraff wrote in the Atlantic,

"One becomes more and more bound up in Powell's parallel universe, until the novels begin to seem like a long, long, long letter by a witty and kindly old friend, filling one in on what has become of other old friends. I have a number of firends in the real universe who I felt would be susceptible to Dance's charms, and having encouraged them to read it, I find that we can talk about the characters almost as if we were discussing people in our own circles.

In fact, curiously, no books have ever made me feel more as if I were living someone else's life along with him. As one reads A Dance to the Music of Time, one looks forward to meeting certain characters again as much as one does to seeing favorite people in life; one looks forward to parties in the books as much as to real parties."

I wholeheartedly agree.

When Time Magazine put this novel on it's top 100 list, the reviewer stated that "Powell's real triumph is in the way he catches the rhythm of ate itself, the way it brings people together, only to spin them apart, then reunite them later as near-stranges, transformed in unexpected ways by the intervening years." If this book is going to be said to be about anything, it is about coincidence. You meet someone at school, and then 10 years later you are re-introduced to them as a friend's business partner. Everything is just getting reshuffled...as Powell points out in the beginning of the novel:

...These classical projections, and something in the physical attitudes of the men themselves as they turned from the fire, suddenly suggested Poussin's scene in which the Seasons, hand in hand and facing outward, tread in rhythm to the notes of the lyre that the winged and naked greybeard plays. The image of Time brought thoughts of mortality: of human beings, facing outward like the Seasons, moving hand in hand in intricate measure: stepping slowly, methodically, sometimes a trifle awkwardly, in evolutions that take recognisable shape: or breaking into seemingly meaningless gyrations, while partners disappear only to reappear again, once more giving pattern to the spectacle: unable to control the melody, unable, perhaps, to control the steps of the dance.

My friend Steve once asked me if the commitment it takes to read Powell's 3,000+ page magnum opus was worth it. At the time, I was hesitant to answer. And maybe I really need to wait until I'm further away from the experience to say for definate one way or the other. But my reaction right now is - yes. It definately was worth it. Powell is an excellent writer (even if his comma use annoyed me at first), and the characters he created really came to life. I'll never forget them, and I'm sure even if I never read another sentence out of it, decades from now I'll be running into people that I will only be able to describe as Widmerpool-like...or Pamela Flitton-like. As Powell himself said, "A couple of years ago, I stepped down from a very crowded railway carriage in Westbury, and a fellow came up to me, and said, 'I had dinner with my Widmerpool last night...' Everyone has their own Widmerpool."

In the way these characters have entered my consciousness, they are on par with Jay Gatsby and Jordan Baker, Almasy, Hanna and Kip (from The English Patient), Ignatius from Confederacy of Dunces and Edna from The Awakening. (They are, in fact, on par with the characters from my favorite novels. Does this mean that A Dance to the Music of Time might be a new candidate for that honor?) While in most novels, you only get to know a character at a particular instance in their life, in Dance, you know them their whole life. The sheer expanse of the whole thing - 12 novels spanning a half century, written and published over the course of 25 years; 3,000 pages, a million words...makes it much more than a book, as I said when I started this review off. It's not a book, it's an experience - an invitation to live life along with Nick Jenkins. It's a chance to be allowed into a world as vast and richly detailed as Tolkien's Middle Earth, even if it is much closer to reality. Yes, I do think it was worth it. And I am not counting out someday reading it again.

In one of the articles I read while researching A Dance to the Music of Time for this post, the author stated that probably less than one million people have read the series. I'm proud and happy to say that I'm one of them.

Some Interesting Dance Links:

http://www.oberlin.edu/math/faculty/henle/Powell.html
http://www.anthonypowell.org.uk/home.php


I also enjoyed this review:

http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Issue/column?oid=oid%3A789824

Dance Update

I know I’ve been fairly quiet on here lately…pretty much this year so far. Sometimes I feel bad about that – like it’s my duty as a blogger to finish books quicker, or to post more often. But everything seems to get in the way. Work is terribly busy, and probably will be all year. Additionally, my personal life is keeping me equally distracted from reading. But I’m REALLY trying.

So, to tide everyone over until I finish a book, I’ll give my Dance to the Music of Time update.

I don’t think I’ve given an update since I finished the 3rd movement back in August. The third movement focused on World War II. The characters being all proper, upper class Brits, they didn’t really do much. Nick enlisted but ended up working with the foreign officials in London, and Widmerpool ended a Colonel (if I remember correctly). There wasn’t any real “going to war” as in nobody was marching across Europe as a foot soldier. Many people died: Nick’s sister-in-law and her estranged husband in a bombing; Stringham in Asia; Templer was murdered in Egypt. All of that takes place outside of the narrative…Nick is just relaying what’s going on, what people have told him, what people are talking about. Such as: Widmerpool's new wife insinuates that he had Templer murdered...and Templer just happened to be her most recent ex-boyfriend. All the British military jargon bogged the whole thing down for me, and I didn’t particularly enjoy it. It was probably my least favorite of the movements. I know I went on and on about how I hated the first movement, but I think it just took the first 750+ pages to get used to what was going on…to get used to the narrative style, and to accept that Nick’s not going to tell us anything about himself. I think if I went back and reread the first part now, I would enjoy it more.

I’m nearing the end now of it…I’m still more than 500 pages away, but that’s more than 80% of the way. The fourth movement is focusing on those Nick runs into in his career mostly, with the usual characters still hanging around…Quiggin, Members, Widmerpool as always. It’s ok…but I really miss the party-going of the 2nd movement. Nick’s older now, everybody is more settled in.

This book – which I’ve been reading now for almost a year and a half – has become integrated into my life. I read my 10 pages every night, and Shawn will ask, “How is Winterpool doing?” and I say, “Well, his wife just left him.” One night I dreamed that Pamela didn’t really throw all of Trapnel’s manuscript in the canal…just a few pages. She hid the rest in my back yard. I guess these things really do begin to sink in after a while. I don’t know what I’ll do without them…I don’t know what I’ll do when in two months we finally say goodbye – maybe for good, maybe not. I don’t know that I’ll miss Widmerpool though.

Dance update

"I missed my wife."

I've been reading A Dance to the Music of Time for 10 months or so now. I've been reading it for so long that I don't remember if I started it last November or December. For those of you who don't know: Dance consists of four movements, each made up of three novels that were published over the course of a few decades, each about 250 pages = 4 x 3 x 250= a long damn book. I struggled with it at first, but have come to enjoy it. I have, however, been fairly lax about reading it lately, so I am egregiously behind on my schedule for it. I've picked back up a little in the last week...renewing my nightly date with Nick Jenkins. He and I haven't talked in awhile...we need to find our "connection" again.

In chapter 3 of book #7, Nick is granted a brief military leave to visit his wife Isobel, who was then about to give birth. He returns to his post at the end of that chapter. I was wondering when - if ever - Nick was going to tell me whether or not his wife had the baby...as he is notorious for keeping mum on his own life while telling me all about everybody elses. So, I was shocked - shocked I tell you! - when in the first page or two of chapter 4, he tells us that she did have the baby, a boy, and that mother and son were doing well. And then - almost giving me a heart attack (not really, I being hyperbolous - is that a word?) he says what I quoted above - "I missed my wife." Though Nick expressed some feeling regarding the Jean Templer affair, this was the first time he had expressed any emotion at all about his Isobel. Now, I'm just waiting for Widmerpool to show up, as he always does. Everytime the doorbell rings, I think - could it be? So far it hasn't been, but I know he's lurking around here somewhere...

This book is a behomoth, but I'll be honest - I'll miss Nick Jenkins when he's gone. I've really grown to like the chap. But it's ok...I've still got six months or so with him!

Dance Update

As April comes to a close, so does most of my monthly reading. There is always a feeling of anxiety about this time of the month regarding books. It’s an anxiousness to finish the damn things already, and also the feeling of saying goodbye to someone with whom you’ve spent the last month.

I’m plodding along through Dance to the Music of Time (2nd movement) but not as wearily as I did in the first movement. I’m starting to figure some things out in this book:

1. New people are often introduced so that they can reintroduce people Jenkins already knows. For example: Heather Hopkins shows up at Norah and Eleanor’s apartment to borrow an egg. It is casually introduced that she has an upcoming piano gig with “that queen” Max Pilgrim – the one that Deacon yelled at at Milly Andriadis’s party in “A Buyer’s Market.”
2. The plot is driven along SOLELY because Jenkins keeps getting invited to parties. He is at work, then his co-worker Chips takes him to his aunt’s house, where there’s a party going on. At her house, he runs into Mrs. Conyers, an old friend of the family. She invites him over to her place. There, he meets Frederica Tolland, who takes him to see her sister and his old friend Eleanor. Other than his dinner with Widmerpool, that’s all that has happened in the first 100 pages of the 2nd movement. Jenkins just ran into Quiggin and was invited to his cottage, so I imagine that the third chapter will be about that.

I think, however, that TIME magazine’s description of the appeal of this “dodecahedral masterpiece” sums up what makes it enduring and actually better than one (myself included) might originally think:

“Beginning in the 1920's, A Dance to the Music of Time follows the lives of a group of English friends and acquaintances as they make their various ways through life: meeting and parting, succeeding and failing, loving and hating, living and dying. There is ample room for both comedy and tragedy in this capacious, large-hearted work, but Powell's real triumph is the way he catches the rhythm of fate itself, the way it brings people together, only to spin them apart, then reunite them later as near-strangers, transformed in unexpected ways by the intervening years."

Dance to the Music of Time - The Movie Part 1

I'm gearing up for A Dance to the Music of Time, Second Movement, so I rented the first part of the movie version. This was a very good idea. One of the problems that I'm having with the novel is its length, which makes it difficult for me to link things that are said in one volume or chapter with a scene in the next volume or chapter. Those details aren't being linked. The movie made me realize this very clearly. For example: Widmerpool tells Jenkins that he was "very indiscreet" with Gypsy Jones and as a result, he had to pay for her to have an abortion. However, prior to this, Gypsy meets Widmerpool and Jenkins when she and Deacon attend a party with them. At the party, Deacon approaches Nick to ask if he knows a doctor for Gypsy... and he doesn't, "mean the usual general practitioner with the restricted views of his profession." Clearly, Gypsy was in the family way before she met Widmerpool, so her comment later to Nick that "somebody had to pay" makes a lot more sense. When I read about Widmerpool paying for her abortion, I assumed that he had gotten her pregnant, but obviously that wasn't the case: he was just the schmuck that paid.

Also, the quips about Mona: When we find out that she has married Templer (when Nick runs into him while waiting for Members), Mona is at the movies watching a movie that Templer thinks is about lesbians. When Nick tells him that it's not about lesbians, he says that Mona will be disappointed. When Mona was introduced as someone that Nick had already met, I didn't exactly remember. However, the movie made that scene clear. Mona is a friend of Gypsy and she is described by Members: "She really hates men." Will this be developed further in subsequent novels?

The movie makes clear how much Widmerpool is the brunt of everyone's jokes...as well as how he always shows up at the right moment. Sometimes it seems as if he is stalking Nick. There he is on the bus after the car accident with Duport; at the ball where he is described as "ploughing his way round the room, as if rowing a dinghy in rough water" (portrayed hilariously in the film); to pick up Stringham when he is drunk after the reunion.

Seeing the movie was like watching a movie about the lives of your friends, showing stories that you have heard them tell of, but that you weren't present for. The scene of Widmerpool dancing made me laugh out loud...it was so characteristically Widmerpool.

End of the Dance Part 1

Well, this week I did it. I finished the first movement of A Dance to the Music of Time. I put the book down (well, ok, kind of threw it) and there was that woman on the front, staring up at me with her sly smile, mocking me. "Ah ah ah...you still have three more to go..!" Damn you woman! Damn you Nick Jenkins! Damn you Anthony Powell!

I'm not sure which is worse...the prospect of three more movements, or the daunting task of getting through Wings of the Dove. Ok, I'll admit it: I would rather continue to read Powell for the rest of my life than have to suffer through another Henry James. Please, sometime tell me that The Ambassadors is the lowest of the low...please someone tell me that Wings...can only be an improvement!

More Dance...

Still reading Dance to the Music of Time, though the end of the first movement is finally within sight... (as in within 120 or so pages). I've been reading this book since the beginning of December, so the thought of being able to finish is a good feeling. I'll be taking a break from the series in March, to pick up the second movement in April...I want to be able to dedicate myself fully to Wings of the Dove :-) Now that I'm almost half way through the third novel in the Dance series (The Acceptance World), the characters from the first two novels are starting to reappear. In less than 25 pages, there were two instances of Nick saying, "She looks familiar. Oh yes, now I remember. She is so-and-so that I met at a party a number of years ago." Though I understand that characters had to be reintroduced in this manner due to the books publishing history (as a series of individual novels over a number of years), it's becoming annoying. And I never thought that I would say this, but I'm tired of his use of commas. He combines about eight different ideas and side notes in one sentence, all with the use of commas. Just give me a couple extra sentences instead, damn it. It wouldn't kill you. Maybe Powell should have read McCarthy and taken a cue or two from his writing style.

And it kind of bothers me that I know all about what everyone else is doing, but Nick doesn't really tell us much about himself, or what he's been up to. Here's a case in point: Nick's love life. I had read in a summary about Book 2 that Nick loses his virginity to Gypsy Jones after Deacon's funeral. Ok, so there is Gypsy and Nick, and there's dialog, and they're kind of lounging on a couch...and then Nick leaves and goes to Widmerpool's (who, by the way, had recently knocked Gypsy up and was annoyed he had to pay for her abortion). So, I thought, Gyspy and Nick must get together after his dinner with Widmerpool. But then the book was over. What? I went back and re-read the scene between Nick and Gypsy. This was all there was to indicate what had gone on: ..."At least such protests as she put forward were of so formal and artificial an order that they increased, rather than diminised, the impression that a long-established rite was to be enacted...Each product of that slow process of building up of events...coming at last to a head. ..I could not help admitting, in due course, the awareness of a sense of inadequacy. There was no specific suggestion that anything had, as it might be said, "gone wrong"; it was merely that any wish to remain any longer present in those surroundings had suddenly and violently decreased, if not disappeared entirely..." Yup...that's about it. Was I supposed to pick up on that? Because I didn't. He has similarly glossed over the beginning of his affair with Jean Templer.